Catherine Shinners

Strategic, analytical, articulate, whole solution view, creative, execution-oriented, adaptable, tech-savvy, good listener, embraces diverse mindsets, a learner, a leader.

Catherine Shinners
Thought leader, strategic advisor - Communities, Networked Organizations
Twitter: @catshinners
Blog: collaboration-incontext.com
Email: [email protected]

Catherine Shinners works with companies and organizations to bring high impact collaboration and social business capacities to their organizations, business processes and culture to generate new value, advance workforce engagement, accelerate productivity and deepen partner and customer relationships. Her recent work has included the program design, launch and advancement of enterprise social networks and digital change management programs for Fortune 100 companies. She has also brought community and network collaboration models to strategic corporate social responsibility programs and actively managed and facilitated online communities.

The rapidity of change demanded in a world increasingly operating in digital realms at digital speeds has created dynamic openings for knowledge workers and leaders to use social collaboration to more creatively engage human talent, develop and exploit new business models, and overcome organizational impedance. Catherine’s work helps leaders understand how to harness socially enabled groups (beyond cross-functional models) and set in motion networks with business purpose. The programs she’s designed helps knowledge workers learn to manage themselves to high performance in broad networks, to use social tools and constructs to be more adaptable to changing contexts and to increase their capacity to manage complexity.

Catherine is an author, speaker and educator on social networks, communities, and digital transformation. She has co-taught "Networks and Collaboration" and "Social Media in the Organization" courses in Columbia University’s Information and Knowledge Strategy Master’s program since 2014. She co-authored the essay “Innovation by Design" in Smarter Innovation: How Interactive Processes Drive Business Results (K. Pugh, editor, Ark, 2014). Her essay “The Network Mindset” was published in Changing the World of Work, One Human at a Time (Change Agents Worldwide, 2014).

Catherine has lived and worked in Silicon Valley for over 20 years, and has held senior management roles in product management, product marketing and business development for leading high tech companies. She has developed new lines of business in enterprise software for the financial services and telecommunications markets, led go-to-market efforts for Web-based business solutions, identified and structured business and technology partnerships and successfully launched web-based and SaaS online services. She is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin.